At great cost on foreign territory

From the first minute of the war in Ukraine, Russian authorities referred to it as a “special military operation for demilitarization and denazification, » as President Vladimir Putin put it when he read out the invasion decision on the morning of February 24. By analogy with military operations in the North Caucasus and Syria, Putin’s definition was understood as an effective and, if possible, short-term offensive carried out by a limited contingent of professional, well-trained units. So that Russian citizens would not be tempted to call everything that is happening a war, the authorities hastily introduced criminal responsibility for this Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code establishes responsibility for spreading false information about the actions of armed forces; in practice, it is applied against those who have called the special operation a ‘war’ × .

However, this is indeed a war. This is clearly indicated by the quantity and quality of the troops involved in the aggression.

According to the data studied by The Project, all the units of the Russian Armed Forces capable of attacking are taking part in the operation except for those units which remain in reserve on the western borders of Russia, says military expert Yury Fedorov × : these are all the land armies available in the country — 11 combined arms and one tank army, all the offensive forces of the Airborne Forces, all the existing reconnaissance units, the marines of all four fleets, self-propelled artillery, bomber, attack and fighter aviation. The geography of their permanent deployment ranges from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, from Murmansk to Dagestan.

The Russian army numbers about 900,000 men according to a presidential decree, the regular army strength since 2018 is about 1 million men, in December 2021 Defense Minister Shoigu reported that it was manned by 91% × , and before the invasion, probably at least 20% of its personnel was concentrated near Ukraine’s borders. The Russian Ministry of Defense has never disclosed data on the number of troops involved in the war with Ukraine. In February 2022, Michael Carpenter, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the OSCE, spoke of a grouping of 169,000-190,000 troops, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry claimed 120,000 ground troops and another 29,000 aviation and naval personnel. In a conversation with The Project, military expert Yury Fedorov estimated the grouping to be 200 thousand troops or 120 battalion-tactical groups, the same estimate is given by the UK Ministry of Defense × . The remaining combat-ready formations of ground forces are located near the western borders due to possible confrontation with the NATO according to military analyst Yury Fedorov × . Even the 15th Alexandria Motorized Rifle Brigade from the village of Roshchinskiy in the Samara Oblast has been sent to invade Ukraine. This brigade is the only peacekeeping unit in the country that Russia can send to solve international conflicts under the aegis of the UN.

All this huge force is concentrated in the four directions of the offensive.

The units and formations involved in the invasion seemed to have a truly impressive combat experience. They have fought in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, annexed Crimea in 2014, and helped separatists in the Donbass. But the professionalism of units depends not on their history, but on the experience of their personnel. Here things are not so straightforward — judging by numerous testimonies, there were conscripts or servicemen in the units who had only just signed their contracts.

No wonder that casualties in the first days of the war were so high.

In debt to the motherland

The scale of looting in the territories captured by the Russian army was enormous — dozens of photos and videos were published in Telegram channels, where items not related to ammunition were found in broken Russian military equipment. When retreating, the fighters take with them not only stolen jewelry and household equipment, but also worn shoes, toys, and even used toilet bowls. The loot is sent home by transport companies from Russia or Belarus. On March 2, Telegram channel “Belaruski Hayun” published a video showing soldiers of the 56th Airborne Assault Brigade from Feodosia in the office of the “SDEK” express delivery company packing up and handing over tons of looted goods for shipment. Meduza journalists told us that “trophies” were also sent through “SDEK” by the National Guard (Rosgvardiya) troops from Rubtsovsk, Altai Krai. ×

This phenomenon can be explained from a socio-economic point of view. People from the poorest regions of Russia are taking part in the war. Their salaries may be higher than the regional average, but they hardly exceed 50,000 rubles per month according to testimonies of those interviewed by the military, publications in social networks and mass media, and advertisements on recruiting sites × .

As our study showed, invading officers receive more than soldiers, but even the army and navy chiefs and division and brigade commanders included in our sample live much more modestly than those who sent them to war . This, at the very least, is evidenced by the public declarations of the Ministry of Defense for 2019, which The Project studied. We used the most recent most comprehensive public declaration of the Ministry of Defense to compare incomes. In 2021, the income of many high-ranking officials and military officers became classified. Not all commanders held the same positions and ranks at that time as they did in February 2022 × . The average income of an officer, now commander of a land army, in 2019 was about 270,000 rubles per month. By comparison, deputies of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu earned (just officially) an average of 1.2 million rubles per month during the same period, and officers of the General Staff, who directly lead the Russian army and navy, earned an average of 300,000 rubles except the head of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov: he declared an income of 33 million rubles in 2019 × . Only the commanders of military districts and certain branches of the armed forces received the same amount as officials of the Ministry of Defense — about 900 thousand rubles per month.

Three generals out of 12 commanders of ground armies do not own any real estate — they live in service apartments. The rest have one or two small apartments, and only the commander of the 1st tank army, Sergei Kisel, declared an apartment with an area of over 100 m². Commander of the 20th Army Andrey Ivanaev declared the most real estate: his family owns a 68 m² apartment and three plots of land with a total area of 48,500 m². The wives of army commanders also receive very modest wages: an average of 21 thousand rubles a month.

Commanders of divisions and brigades of the ground forces, air force and navy earned an average of 160 thousand rubles a month. Division and brigade commanders also do not own much property: one or two small apartments at the most, some also have a plot of land Only commanders of the 2nd and 45th GRU Special Forces Brigades Konstantin Bushuev and Vadim Pankov declared 7,494 and 3,750 m² of real estate respectively — several apartments, houses, land plots × .

Divisions and brigades in the Russian army are mainly commanded by colonels. For example, the average salary of an officer with the same rank in Germany is three times higher than in Russia.

Astonishingly, every third top commander of the Russian army advancing into Ukraine 54 people out of 166 × was found to have debts, including housing and utilities bills and alimony payments.

Five people in our sample were brought to administrative responsibility, including one for his unwillingness to fight corruption among his subordinates. In 2020, the court sentenced Colonel Igor Koleda, commander of the 30th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 2nd Combined Arms Army, to a fine for refusing to comply with the prosecutor’s demand and dismiss a corrupt officer. Koleda himself is listed in the state databases as an alimony defaulter. His unit had been advancing on Kharkiv.

Every fifth person in our sample 34 people out of 166 × had traffic fines some of them for speeding by more than 60 km/h × , and every sixth person didn’t pay them on time. Among the officers there are those who have been deprived of their license for drunk driving or provoking an accident.

These people are the pick of the modern Russian army. Men at the peak of their strength, experienced and relatively well educated. They all have higher education In Russia, officer ranks, starting with lieutenant, are assigned only to people with higher education × . 40% of commanders have studied at the Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces, the Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy and the Academy of the General Staff in addition to their specialty education. So, there is no point in talking about the socio-economic situation of their subordinates, the ordinary soldiers of the Russian army.

Unfriendly fire

In late March, after five weeks of unsuccessful attempts to seize Ukraine’s capital, Russian troops began to withdraw from the Kyiv area, leaving horrific evidence of street fighting and extrajudicial killings. Destroyed houses, burnt-out cars, and dozens of bodies of civilians shot at point-blank range were lying directly in the streets. Women and minors were raped This was stated by Ukrainian Ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova, among others × .

Such brutality seems unprecedented, because for years the Kremlin propaganda has been creating an image of the Russian army as “polite people”. But if we study the biographies of the senior officers and the histories of the units that were entrusted to them, it becomes clear that the soldiers do have someone to learn from.

The Kyiv suburb of Bucha became a symbol of the brutality of the Russian military — photos of lacerated civilian bodies taken there appeared on the covers of the world’s media in early April. The 64th Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 35th Combined Arms Army was deployed in Bucha among others the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine accused soldiers from the 64th Brigade of crimes in Bucha × . This unit is stationed in the settlement of Knyaz-Volkonskoye in Khabarovsk Krai and is well known to the local population: its call sign, “Mlechnik, » has become a proverbial name in Khabarovsk.

“Mlechnik” is considered a hellish place among conscripts. Parents of soldiers who served in the 64th Brigade in 2017-2019 say that the food in the unit is poor  — conscripts lose 10-25 kg × , it is cold in the barracks, and the uniforms issued are old and out of size. “Before some inspections, some of the soldiers are hidden in the baths, forests and other places for some reason. Maybe they don’t want to frighten the inspectors with the soldiers’ appearance since their uniforms, boots and physical condition leave much to be desired, » says the mother of one of the conscripts.

Field exercises are held twice a year at the training ground, where there are no basic living conditions. In winter and summer, the soldiers live in tents and wash themselves in an earthen pit, where they also wash their clothes. Because of all this, the recruits often fall ill, but there is no medical unit in the brigade. A nurse instructor treats the soldiers with the most primitive medicines, like paracetamol.

But the worst thing in “Mlechnik” is beatings and extortion. Both conscripts and officers engage in it. Soldiers from the national republics get into gangs and harass fellow conscripts: they take away their cash, bank cards and cell phones. In 2019, for example, a conscript from “Mlechnik” was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison for bullying and extorting a fellow soldier.

Not only do senior enlisted personnel not stop their subordinates, they themselves participate in the bullying. In February 2022, a senior warrant officer and a sergeant beat six privates. The drunken warrant officer checked the numbers on the soldiers’ bedside tables and slippers and beat those whose numbers did not match with a stick. One of the conscripts asked the sergeant to stop the warrant officer, but he joined in the torture.

Due to the fact that conscripts have no one to complain to, they try to run away from the unit or get a medical discharge — “they eat chlorine and swallow needles” former conscripts testify on the forums × . Sometimes soldiers go to extreme measures. For example, in 2014 conscript Alexei Snakin committed suicide. Major Nikolai Chabanov beat him with a broom handle, forced him to wear a bulletproof vest and gas mask all day long, and shortly before his death, he put Alexei “on a clock”, telling him to buy him a new computer. The court first sentenced Chabanov to a suspended sentence, and only after the intervention of human rights activists was the major sentenced to 3.5 years in a colony with deprivation of the right to hold senior positions for two years.

The “Mlechnik” servicemen show cruelty not only to fellow soldiers. In 2015, in the garrison in Knyaz-Volkonsky, a group of servicemen beat a passerby to death. The witness was the unit’s cook, who was passing by and stood up for the victim. He tried to call for help, but the crowd turned on him. “I went to the officer on duty. The chief warrant officer came out, the military police were here, and they were beating me in front of them, » he later told reporters. The cook eventually shot one of the attackers with a traumatic weapon and dragged the battered man to his car, where he died before medics arrived.

Khabarovsk Krai ranks third in Russia in terms of the number of sentences handed down in cases of non-statutory relations in the army as calculated by Novaya Gazeta. From 2016 to 2019, courts of first instance heard 92 cases under Articles 334, 335, 336 of the Criminal Code here × . In second place is Primorsky Krai, which has its own “hell’s kitchen” — the village of Sergeevka. The 127th Motorized Rifle Division of the 5th Combined Arms Army, which also fought on the Kyiv front, is stationed there.

In 2018, 20-year-old contract serviceman Roman Sapegin escaped from the unit in Sergeyevka. He reported bullying, beatings and extortion by fellow servicemen from the Caucasus: “They take away phones and bank cards.” The last straw for him was the episode when a sergeant forced a private to wash the toilet bowl with his bare hands and severely beat him for refusing.

“Last year, a sentry in our unit shot himself at night, two more conscripts were run over to death by an Ural truck right on the firing range, and another soldier hanged himself, » he said.

“You don’t give away your beloved”

Alexander Lukashenko said this phrase in August 2020. By “beloved, » he meant Belarus, the country he had led for 26 years at the time. This phrase may have become a symbol of totalitarian cruelty: that summer, hundreds of Belarusians who came out to protest peacefully against the results of the presidential elections in Minsk and other cities were arrested, tortured, given criminal sentences, or forced to flee the country. That is, people were punished for fighting for the future of their own country. Now exactly the same cruelty to civilians is being demonstrated by Russian commanders who were born and raised on the territory of modern-day Ukraine.

Every eighth officer of those we have identified is affiliated with Ukraine.